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A searing eyewitness account of what life was like in the prison camps of China during the 1960s and 1970s—through the rise of the Cultural Revolution and the Red Brigade, the death of Mao to the struggles of post-Maoist China. (From description on publisher’s web site.)

“Prisoner of Mao is a harrowing account of life in China's vast apparatus of prisons and labor camps, describing how Chinese authorities used psychological techniques to coerce the innocent and the guilty into submission. It also reveals how thin the line between survival and starvation became during China's famine in the early 1960's.”—The New York Times

In August 1966 a group of Red Guards ransacked the home of Nien Cheng. Her background made her an obvious target for the fanatics of the Cultural Revolution: educated in London, the widow of an official of Chiang Kaishek's regime, and an employee of Shell Oil, Nien Cheng enjoyed comforts that few of her compatriots could afford. When she refused to confess that any of this made her an enemy of the state, she was placed in solitary confinement, where she would remain for more than six years.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the Chinese people suffered what may have been the worst famine in history. Over thirty million perished in a grain shortage brought on not by flood, drought, or infestation, but by the insanely irresponsible dictates of Chairman Mao Ze-dong's "Great Leap Forward," an attempt at utopian engineering gone horribly wrong.

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